ALIENATION
Alienation is the process in which people
become foreign to the world they are living in. The concept of alienation is
deeply fixed in all the great religions, social and political theories of the
civilized epoch, namely, the idea that some time in the past people lived in
harmony, and then there was some kind of rupture which left people feeling like 16416v2111q
foreigners in the world, but some time in the future this alienation would be
overcome and humanity would again live in harmony with itself and nature.
First of all, when we talk about alienation
we talk about people who are strangers of everything, who become more and more
superficial. They live outside their selves more than inside forgetting how
important are the people around and how much their souls need the attention
that alienated people are not any more able to provide. People can feel, can be
disturbed, can appreciate and can love. Feelings are something that alienation destroys
and chases making the human being a lost person so called alienated.
Moreover, throughout the ages, some
of the brightest minds in the history of humankind have tackled the topic of
alienation. From its origins in ancient Greece and the old
testament, through the present day, alienation has been an underlying
theme of social thought. Modern intellectuals have cited alienation as the
cause of many or most of societal problems.
The word "alienation" in
normal usage refers to a feeling of separateness, of being alone and apart from
others. For Marx, alienation was not a feeling or a mental condition, but an
economic and social condition of class society - in particular, capitalist society.
All in all alienation,
like capitalism itself, is not God-made, it is
historically produced man-made evil, neither rooted in nature or human nature.
The Marxist theory of alienation implies and contains a theory of disalienation,
part of revolutionary theory-praxis, by means of which the material and
intellectual conditions are created for the gradual disappearance of all forms
of alienation. Labour must not be a coercive necessity to
hunt for money, but a creative self-realisation occupation. The
transformation of human labour into all-sided creative human activity is the
ultimate aim of scientific socialism on a global scale. Only when World
Socialism is attained, and World Capitalism totally destroyed, will alienation
disappear from our galaxy. At least that is the solution given by the authors
of this theory of alienation.
